Report for ISMAR 2010, Korea - Yongsoon Choi
ISMAR Conference 2010 ISMAR 2010 Concept: Borderless This theme of this year’s ISMAR conference is "Borderless" sparked by the convergence of Mixed and Augmented Reality, ubiquitous technology and global connectivity. In the rapidly emerging application of Mixed and Augmented Reality, how do we make sense of time and space now? With no clear-cut boundary between what is natural and artificial, we are faced with ambiguity, transience, and contingency. How will melting the boundaries between real, virtual and imaginary realities transform our world? AMH (Art, Media, and Humanities) Track Flavor visualization presentation There were 8 papers, 14 posters in the AMH track. And it started from 14 th of Oct. to 16th of Oct.. I could present a “Flavor Visualization: Taste guidance in co-cooking system for coexistence “ paper on 14th as a last presenter. My presentation went well and I got some good ideas and feedbacks after finishing presentation from audiences. Especially, Rapael Grasset who is a research fellow in HIT lab in New Zealand proposed interesting ideas based on my prototype. In fact, the current system can show the cooking partner’s face or his/her kitchen as the background of visualization. But his proposal was to show the cooking food not partner’s face and kitchen because it is more efficient and enhance to feel the real flavors with real food images. And it may be used for i-phone application or other related application to check the flavor before tasting in near future. I absolutely agreed his idea but I explained current our prototype system is for the interface system of co-cooking system to explain the flavors in remote. But that idea was quite feasible and interesting one for me. Interesting subject – Nokia’s storytelling AR In this time, some of Nokia Hollywood lab members attended to ISMAR 2010 conference and one of member, Jason, gave very interesting AR contents they just published It is basically storytelling contents using natural figure tracking-AR system on mobile phone. The scenario is like this, you can play with other tourists when you visit to Hollywood and you can follow the instruction using mobile phone. You can hear and see the event of scenarios according to you track the meaningful gadgets or buildings on the scenario. Their scenario was about on love story with Marilyn Monroe in Hollywood and many tourists could be attracted and thought the story was non-fiction even though this is a just scenario as like a novel. It was quite interesting for me and I though it has many possibilities to be used to tour business and tour contents areas. Panel Discussion & Epilog In this conference, I could meet a prof. Kato Hirokazu and many of AR superstars. And I could hear what they are thinking about AR. Actually I didn’t know many of AR researchers were developing the AR toolkit for the industrial and medical services in the first stage, because AR is more popular in the entertainment area in these days. He asked to all participants in ISMAR 2010 “Is it right direction we are going in AR? “ It was impressive question. It has passed over 10 years from his AR toolkit developing. I think he might think and see where we are in AR. He seemed to want to check where we have to go for the correct direction that he and other colleagues want to contribute to the society. And another issue was on HMD. In the beginning of AR, HMD was very expected to contribute AR technology and related industries but current situation is not very different from 10 years ago. It is clearly very slow developments than AR software and contents areas. Many of HMD researchers issued the funding problem. Because many funding is focusing on contents and AR software parts, not HMD and this kind of un-balance funding situation made technical unbalance between HMD and AR contents areas. I could meet many of passionate researchers in AR and MXR area and see many possibilities that AR and MXR can be used in many different fields not only game and entertainment area. And this visiting gave me quite good motivations to rethink my position and researches in these fiends.